This blog used to be called EDL Extra. I was a supporter (neither a member nor a leader) of the EDL until 2012. This blog has retained the old web address.****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Sunday, 2 July 2017

Metro (UK) on Trump's Hatred of Women and the Media

Metro
(sometimes
calledMetro.co.uk)
began life as the online sister of another newspaper that's now
available (for free!) on Britain's public-transport system. It broke
free of that hard-copy
newspaper in 2015. It still belongs to the same company and it's even
based in the same building! However, you'll be glad to know that
Metro1
(“The
world's most popular free newspaper”)
and
Metro2(“News...
but not as you know it”)are
completely
different
publications with completely
separate
editorial teams. Yes.

Metro1
is slightly more serious and less “tabloid” that
Metro2;
though they both propagate (broadly speaking) the same liberal-left
political views.

Bear
all the above in mind when – in what follows - you read Metro's
critical comments on Donald Trump's own critical comments about...
yes, the
media!

Metro
and Trump on Women

Metro2
- which has managed to secure millions of readers every day – is a
strange news outlet. (I'll stop using the superscript2now.)
It's
unashamedly political and doesn't seem to be able to distinguish
opinion pieces from news items.

It
starts off badly and gets worse from there. It deigns to tell us
“what [Trump] thinks of women”. It turns out it's what Trump
thinks of one
woman (MSNBC's Ms Mika Brzezinski) and even that's pretty tame.
Still, if you don't like a man's politics; then everything he says
and does is fair game.

This
righteous young
journalist
pontificates more. He writes: “Dear. Lord. This guy has zero
respect for the opposite sex.” (I bet Oliver McAteer himself is a
consummate New Man. I also bet that he washes the dishes at least
once a month and usesoodles
of expensive face cream.)

All
this is in response to one of Trump's jokes (quoted by Metro).
It's fairly funny; if a little mean. It goes:

“…to
Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on
joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

What
has to be stated here is that MSNBC's Ms Mika Brzezinski fired the
first shot when she accused Trump of being “needy”. Or should I
say that that she indulged in a bit of bullying
because her employer – MSNBC - accused Trump himself of “bullying”.
Despite her reference to being
needy,
Trump has also been a serial target of Ms Brzezinski for a long
time. Indeed Metro
itself
even shows us one of Brzezinski's previous bullying anti-Trump
tweets!

Justdesserts
anyone?

To
get back to Metro.

What
these pious anti-sexists (such as Metro's
Oliver McAteer) seem unable to distinguish is that a joke about one
woman (or even a few women) is not
also a joke about all
women (or women
generally).
The same is true of jokes about blacks. According to some pious and
pure anti-sexists (or anti-racists), however, whatever the content of
a joke about a woman (or a black) is, it is - by
definition
- sexist (or racist). The very fact that's it's a joke and it's also
about a woman (or a black person) is literally all it takes... Unless
that woman is Prime Minister Theresa May or the black is an Uncle Tom
– then women and blacks are (almost) fair game.

So
how would a joke about, say, a well-known “Tory MP” having a
penis enlargement go down at Metro?
Probably very well. In fact I've seen such things in this glossy and
glitzyrag.

Anyway,
the hypocrisy is further confounded by the fact that in one breath
Donald Trump is castigated for “cyber bullying”; and in the next
breath this imbecile writes:

“Luckily,
these guys have a sense of humor and can take a bit of cyber-bulling,
unlike someone we know well [Trump].”

(Why
is a British journalist using American spellings anyway?)

So
cyber-bulling is okay if aimed at Trump and other nasty right-wing
white men; though bad when aimed at CNN journalists, blacks and
Muslims?

“Ironic
that the FLOTUS pledged to head up a campaign against online trolling
when Trump first took office. Yeah, maybe start with the problems at
home first.”

Metro
and Trump on the Media

To
return to the beginning of this article. Here's Metro's
(or Oliver McAteer's) very first line:

“The
president of the United States of America (just remember that, for a
second) took his ‘FAKE NEWS’ campaign to the next level this
morning by going after the presenters of Morning Joe.”

You
couldn't get more opinionated than that, could you?

Metro
then says that “Trump’s been stepping up his campaign of hate
against the media this week”. Well, for a start, the writer (or
Metro
itself) is part of that media. So I wonder if that is in any way
relevant to Metro's
piously hypocritical words about Trump.

Moreover,
rather than castigate the journalists who lied about Trump's
connections with Russia, this infantile journalist turns the whole
story on its head and castigates Trump for having a go at the
journalists responsible for those lies! He informs us:

“In
case you missed it, three journalists from CNN resigned on Monday
June 26 over a Russia-related story that had to be retracted. Trump
celebrated, obviously.”

It
seems that because this journalist's views are broadly in line with
CNN (or at least its position on Trump) that he therefore has no
critical eyes for anyone other than Trump. He continues:

“But
somehow, in between dealing with an international travel ban and
meeting the Indian PM, he found time to take yet another swipe at the
news channel.”

At
least he deigns to actually quote Trump thus:

“'Fake
News CNN is looking at big management changes now that they got
caught falsely pushing their phony Russian stories. Ratings way
down!'”

Again,
there's not a single critical word here about CNN itself.

It's
also strange that left-leaning or liberal-left people (perhaps even
the ones who work for Metro)
have had it in for the “right-wing media” for years. Yet here we
have a Metropolitan
“liberal” talking dismissively about “Trump's hate for the
media”.

He
tells us, for example, that Trump “went rogue and blasted loads of
other American media outlets as well”. He then quotes Trump's tweet
itself:

“'So
they caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS & ABC?
What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost? They are all
Fake News!'”

Another
funny thing about this cartoon piece (from a cartoon newspaper) is
that its slags off Trump's “inappropriate tweets”
and
then tells us how funny various anti-Trump Tweets are. Indeed
Metro
itself is often chock-a-block with such tweets!